JOIN US‘Speed Kills: Slow Down and Live.’ So say American road signs urging drivers to lighten their foot on the gas pedal. But little else has slowed down in the US or elsewhere in the 36 years since traffic planners instituted a 55 mile-per-hour national highway speed limit (and later, in haste, repealed it). In a global culture dominated by the impatience of youth, counted in nanoseconds and fuelled by just-in-time supply chains, everything needs to be done yesterday since today is no longer soon enough.
But just when it seems warp speed has altogether extinguished the present, movements to slow down and savour lifes pleasures are springing up in those very cultures most addicted to acceleration. Ancient eastern cultures like China and India, long trapped in poverty and technological backwardness, now surge forward, sweeping away centuries of slow-moving village life and much rich culture with it in frenetic industrial development.
Meanwhile, western societies long addicted to speed find themselves stalled in life-altering recession. A downward-trending economy is forcing many Americans to stick closer to home. Once an eagerly anticipated adventure, air travel has become an expensive, often excruciating ordeal. Home cooking, gardening, and the long-lost art of conversation are all regaining popularity. Unemployment and under-employment are reversing the priorities of mainstream middle and working class Americans. With less money but more time, many are rediscovering the pleasures of non-monetary work and play.
Reversal
Even the most advanced sectors of big business, ever conscious that ‘time is money’, find themselves having to scale back employee travel and making more efficient use of rapidly evolving technologies to move electrons rather than bodies.
Some of these changes are less self-chosen than forced by shifting conditions. But there are also highly conscious movements. Slowness advocates cite their genesis in Italy’s ‘slow food movement’ founded by Carlo Petrini in the 1980s during a campaign to prevent a MacDonald’s from being built near Rome’s Spanish Steps. Slow food advocates seek not just more attention to the arts of cooking but a more locally sourced and sustainable agriculture, a more compassionate animal husbandry, and a more leisurely savouring of flavours in the equally important art of eating.
Slow food has since proliferated into slow travel, slow art, slow design, even slow sex.
The Seattle-based ‘Take Back Your Time’ movement argues for jumping off the juggernaut as a means of regaining control of your life, reducing your impact on the environment, improving personal and public health, and saving money. National Coordinator John de Graaf points to startlingly counterintuitive statistics to support his conclusion that for all their inescapable hardship, on balance economic downturns have been good for both personal and public health. For every one per cent increase in unemployment, there is a half per cent decrease in the death rate. The greatest lengthening of American lifespans — six years — occurred during the Great Depression.
Moreover, during the current recession there has been more volunteerism, a 40 per cent increase in home gardening, and a 20 per cent decrease in US traffic fatalities (10,000 fewer deaths per year). With official unemployment over 10 per cent and the underemployed adding another seven per cent, the average workweek is 33 hours, its lowest level since 1964. With less driving, there’s been less air pollution and correspondingly lower rates of asthma.
Until recently, the slow movement has been largely confined to those with the leisure and means to afford to slow down. But the Great Recession may drive a much more mainstream American culture to begin exploring slower, less consumptive ways of being and doing. The energy, environmental, and health benefits of slowing down in the speed-addicted West are potentially enormous. But they may well be diminished, if not altogether overwhelmed, by the sudden acceleration of eastern economies and cultures.
Western Europe is decades ahead of North America in its turn towards slowness. Having endured centuries of war, revolution and industrialisation, Europeans breathed a collective sigh of grief and relief after the losses of the Second World War and embraced a more leisurely lifestyle. As the declining superpower, the US is about to experience a definitive downsizing. For some, resentment and a refusal to face facts is fuelling a defiant pedal to the metal mentality. But for many others, this deceleration is an opportunity to slow down and savour what’s been lost during generations of hot pursuit. And for still others, its a necessity that could just become a discovery and delight. As the Buddhists advise, Don’t just do something. Sit there.
IPS